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Inset: U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer (U.S. Courts/YouTube). Background: Republican Candidate for President Donald Trump attends the Building America’s Future, Southeastern Pennsylvania Roundtable at the Drexelbrook Event Center on October 29, 2024, in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania (Matt Bishop/imageSPACE/Sipa USA via AP Images).
A Republican member of the House on Wednesday introduced articles of impeachment against a federal judge who recently barred DOGE staffers from accessing sensitive Treasury Department data.
Early on the morning of Feb. 8, Manhattan-based U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer issued a temporary restraining order blocking such access and requiring all the relevant Elon Musk-aligned employees to “destroy” any copies of documents that were previously downloaded.
Reaction online was swift and fierce – with numerous allies of President Donald Trump calling for Engelmayer’s impeachment.
Now, those calls have been answered.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden, a Republican from Wisconsin, filed House Resolution 143, which accuses the judge of “high crimes and misdemeanors” over the temporary restraining order. The bill was subsequently referred to the House Judiciary Committee.
“Paul Engelmayer, as a judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, engaged in judicial misconduct when he halted President Donald J. Trump’s Executive order establishing and implementing the President’s Department of Government Efficiency on purely political grounds, demonstrating clear bias and prejudice against the President and the 74,000,000 Americans who voted for him,’ the first article of the resolution reads.
Under a heading alleging “judicial misconduct and abuse of judicial authority,” the first article of impeachment takes direct stock of Engelmayer’s ruling and alleges that the temporary restraining order” demonstrates clear bias and prejudice against the President” and “willfully” disregards “established legal precedent.”
Van Orden also criticizes the judge for the speed with which the temporary restraining order was granted.
The resolution alleges Engelmayer acted “outside the bounds of judicial decency” by “submitting this injunction in the middle of the night” and says the timing “may have been done with the intent to influence the outcome of cases to favor certain parties.”
Temporal concerns, of course, did play a part in issuing the pre-injunction pause – but the judge did not mention the predawn nature of the ruling. The temporary restraining order was issued in response to a request for emergency relief from a 19-state coalition led by New York Attorney General Letitia James.
“The Court’s firm assessment is that, for the reasons stated by the States, they will face irreparable harm in the absence of injunctive relief,” the temporary restraining order reads. “That is both because of the risk that the new policy presents of the disclosure of sensitive and confidential information and the heightened risk that the systems in question will be more vulnerable than before to hacking.”
The second article of impeachment is quite a bit shorter, premised on the “abuse of judicial power,” and reads, in full:
Judge Paul Engelmayer has abused his judicial office by using his authority to further personal or political interests, contrary to the constitutional responsibility to apply the law impartially, including the improper handling of this case in a manner that demonstrates favoritism or undue influence, undermining the fundamental principles of justice.
The impeachment effort jumps the gun – in this case, a Sig Sauer P226 – on similar such articles promised last week by Rep. Eli Crane, an Arizona Republican. In a Wednesday afternoon post on X (formerly Twitter), Crane said he would file his resolution by Friday. Both Van Orden and Crane previously served as U.S. Navy SEALs.
The Trump administration, for their part, quickly implored the court to reconsider the restraining order – arguing that it appears to cover Senate-approved Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
The next day, U.S. District Judge Jeannette A. Vargas – to whom the case was actually assigned – clarified the scope of the restraining order to make clear that it did not apply to “any Officer of the United States Department of the Treasury nominated by the President and confirmed by the United States Senate.”
As of this writing, the impeachment bill has no cosponsors.
